I was having a chat with a number student early this morning at the Inter Uni Game Jam 2012 re Gameathons and Hacks they have attended. Ludum Dare seems to a great and popular online competition for rapid prototyped games. However it was clear from the discussions students building XNA were severely hindered due to the nature of Lumun Dare and its 1000s of competitors, the reason being, is that the majority of the competitors will only play games Online that don't have to be complied so Flash and Unity web player games are really popular.

So we got onto discussing XNA to Unity or as its called UnityXNA which is simply a straightforward way of getting XNA games running in Unity3D. This was a rather interesting discussion with Ph.D student Luke Shares a member of the DevSoc team had actually already been experimenting with this and built a solution for the DevSoc 1st years for Lumun Dare entrys and we compared his work from Barnaby Smith, MVI Networks who has released a solution on GitHub at https://github.com/mvi/UnityXNA

What's rather interesting is that MVI Networks solution, make Zero code changes to the original XNA game code. Barnaby has used a mixture of new code and some code from MonoXNA to implement XNA emulation by having a game object with a script attached run an XNA game performing updates and drawing.

Microsoft Learning is thrilled to announce a new Jump Start for developers focused on building apps for Windows Phone 8.

This special live online course is scheduled for two full days of fast-paced, demo-rich sessions led by my colleague and fellow Microsoft Technical Evangelist, Andy Wigley, and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Strategist, Rob Tiffany. Andy and Rob are two of the most respected experts in mobile app development and are excited to help C#/XAML developers get the most out of the Windows 8 platform.

Help us spread the word with a blog post or a tweet like this one: Building Apps for #WindowsPhone 8 #MSJumpStart w/ @andy_wigley & @robtiffany 11/28! #wpdev http://aka.ms/WP8-Apps-JS @MSLearning

What’s a “Jump Start” Course?Training specifically designed for experienced technologists whose jobs demand they know how to best leverage new, emerging Microsoft technologies. These advanced courses assume a certain level of expertise and domain knowledge, so they move quickly and cover topics in a fashion that enables teams to effectively map new skills to real-world situations.

Cannot spare the two day on the 28th and 28th

The first UK in person - Windows Phone 8 DevCamps will be help in London on Friday 14th December and Saturday 15th December.

The Windows Phone 8 Camps have been designed to show you how to build a Windows Phone 8 app. You can tailor the day to make it as personally productive and rewarding as possible. You can work on your own projects with assistance from Windows Phone 8 experts, network with others and also have the option of attending short tutorial sessions on Windows Phone 8 related topics.

The Windows Phone 8 Camps will cover an introductory overview session as well as a range of short tutorial sessions. Short tutorial sessions will include topics such as the Windows Phone 8 application lifecycle, new Windows Phone 8 controls such as the LongListPicker, a high level view of the platform – i.e. how .NET and the Windows Phone Runtime APIs work together and the choice around implementation technology, new Windows Phone 8 features such as the Speech API, app to app communication with file and protocol associations, lock screen notifications and in-app purchase, how to make the most of the new Tile templates, and how to make best use of the tooling – the role of Visual Studio and Expression Blend. We’ll also cover how to share code between a Windows Phone 8 app and a Windows 8 app.

In addition, you will learn how you can publish your Windows Phone 8 app into the Windows Phone Store.

The Windows Phone 8 Camp will kick off at 9am and officially finish at 6pm or 9pm for the hardcore attendees.

· Meet members of the Unity and Windows evangelism team and get great advice on developing great Windows Store games.

Live Stream

If you can’t attend in person, watch the live stream of the event at http://channel9.msdn.com. You do not have to register for the live stream; just point your browser to Channel 9 or to our registration site on the day of the event.

There are a number of physics/games engines being used within academia and with the release of Windows 8 the following video discusses how to consume a non-WinRT C++ Code set see: Building Windows Runtime Components with C++.

This weekend 17th – 18th Nov. I will be at supporting and judging at the UK’s Uni Game Jam 2012, #UJ2012 hosted at the Nottingham Trent University.

A number of teams from across the UK will hopefully using the event to have a great time but also start developing and refining their personal portfolios and CVs. There will be lots of ideas following over the 24 hours and hopefully a good number will become entries into this years gaming category for the www.imaginecup.com

Student game jams are great fun and a great way of getting experience, CV and portfolio materials development and may be even a amazing game into a store or marketplace. So I am looking forward to a few hours of sleep and no doubt a NERF shoot out or two and seeing what can be achieved.

GameMaker allows school and college students to become part of the App Generation with Windows 8 and GameMaker: Studio.

By creating Windows Store ready applications, GameMaker: Studio allows you to integrate with the new fast and fluid Start screen, with access to Live Tiles, Snap View and Charms as well as allowing you to target multiple Windows 8 devices, from tablets to laptops to all-in-one devices.

Windows is still by far the largest platform in the world. There are over a billion Windows PCs in current use, including 500m Windows 7 devices as of last December and with the majority of Windows Licenses sold with a new PC, Windows 8 offers developers a huge opportunity.

From Tablets to Laptops to desktops and All-in-Ones, Windows 8 users get a unified experience across all devices and

GameMaker offers developers a complete game development solution including support of Windows 8 features; Live Tiles, Snap View and the Share Charm.

Its is important that developers have choices and can reuse their skills and code to build Windows Phone 8 applications and this is extremely important within academia as we don't want you having to make drastic changes to your approved curricula.

This added support for Windows Phone 8 in diverse open source and cross platform frameworks was made possible thanks to new features in Windows Phone 8: native C++ programming and Internet Explorer 10 expanded HTML5 support.

Developers who have applications based on these frameworks can publish them to the Windows Phone Store in record time. And this applies to various domains, like gaming with

Jay Garcia, CTO at Modus Create, and his team are developing a mobile companion application for the game Diablo III: “Using Blizzard’s Diablo III web APIs in combination with PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, we were able to hugely increase the game’s fan base because we could build and publish our application to both iOS and Android with the same HTML5 and JavaScript code base. It literally took us a few days to get the same code to run on Windows Phone 8 thanks to this newly added support.” You can read more about Modus Create work to migrate their application to Windows Phone 8 on their blog post.

Craig Walker, CTO at Xero commented on the new support for Windows Phone 8 in Sencha Touch: “Using web standards-based technologies such as Sencha Touch and Apache Cordova for our mobile accounting software application Xero Touch helped us target a wide range of platforms so our customers could focus on their business, not the underlying technology. Support for these technologies in Windows Phone 8 tools made it an easy Xero Touch build for our dev team, and a smart addition for our customers who need flexibility managing their business on the go.”

Brett Nagy, Technical Director at Microgroove, and his team got a chance to try the Windows Phone 8 tools and the early Sencha Touch support for Windows Phone 8: “Our apps have been making companies more productive for well over a decade. Sencha Touch support for Windows Phone 8 has made our engineer team more productive by allowing us to easily re-use code from one mobile platform to another. Within a couple of hours, we had the basic Windows Phone 8 themed version of an existing app without requiring any changes to its JavaScript codebase. Now that producing builds that run on Windows Phone 8 is part of our regular workflow, the next step is to build out functionality that really takes advantage of that platform. Knowing that we can do that in HTML + JS allows us to extend our reach beyond iOS and Android with minimal change to our projects timelines.”

This is the first time so many open source and cross platform frameworks are on board with Windows Phone on the first day of a new SDK version release. It is great to see how much communities are eager to work with Windows Phone.

And today is just the beginning. We want to continue this effort to help open source developers enable their frameworks on Windows Phone 8. It’s important for developers to reuse their skills, expand the market opportunity to make money on our devices, and build the next generation of apps. Imagine the possibilities.